He’s not very good, but he doesn’t care. Once, at Uncle Tony’s fiftieth birthday, he broke a karaoke machine. He reckoned it wasn’t his fault, but these are the facts: it was about his sixth song, he was singing loudly (and badly) when the speakers suddenly went pop and bang, a whole bunch of blue sparks flew out of the back of the machine, and there was a smoky smell in the room that was quite different from the smoky smell of Uncle Tony’s barbecue. Everyone thought this was pretty funny, and one person even fell off his chair from laughing too hard, but Dad didn’t look even slightly embarrassed, not even when someone pointed out that he was singing ‘Smoke on the Water’. Dad just shrugged and said, ‘So what? That’s not what I was singing anyway.’ And then he started singing all over again, without the microphone or any backing music at all this time: ‘Slow-motion Walter, fire engine guy . . .’ He does get song words wrong quite often. He reckons he honestly doesn’t know that they’re wrong, but I’m pretty sure he’s not always telling the truth.
